Download or read book The Free Diary of Albie Sachs written by Albie Sachs and published by Random House (NY). This book was released on 2004 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter written by Albie Sachs and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2014-07-03 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On April 7, 1988, Albie Sachs, an activist South African lawyer and a leading member of the ANC, was car-bombed in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, by agents of South Africa’s security forces. His right arm was blown off, and he lost sight in one eye. This intimate and moving account of his recovery traces the gradual recuperation of his broken body and his triumphant reentry into the world, where his dream of soft vengeance was realized with the achievement of democracy in South Africa. This book captures the spirit of a remarkable man: his enormous optimism, his commitment to social justice, and his joyous wonder at the life that surrounds him. A new preface and epilogue reflect on the making of Abby Ginzberg’s documentary film titled Soft Vengeance: Albie Sachs and the New South Africa. (For information about the film, see www.softvengeancefilm.org.)
Download or read book The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law written by Albie Sachs and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-10 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Albie Sachs gives an intimate account of his extraordinary life and work as a judge in South Africa. Mixing autobiography with reflections on his major cases and the role of law in achieving social justice, Sachs offers a rare glimpse into the workings of the judicial mind and a unique perspective on modern South African history.
Download or read book Laughing at the Gods written by Allan C. Hutchinson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-20 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Any effort to understand how law works has to take seriously its main players – judges. Like any performance, judging should be evaluated by reference to those who are its best exponents. Not surprisingly, the debate about what makes a 'great judge' is as heated and inconclusive as the debate about the purpose and nature of law itself. History shows that those who are candidates for a judicial hall of fame are game changers who oblige us to rethink what it is to be a good judge. So the best of judges must tread a thin line between modesty and hubris; they must be neither mere umpires nor demigods. The eight judges showcased in this book demonstrate that, if the test of good judging is not about getting it right, but doing it well, then the measure of great judging is about setting new standards for what counts as judging well.
Download or read book The jail diary of Albie Sachs written by David Edgar and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book When They Came for Me written by John R. Schlapobersky and published by Jonathan Ball Publishers. This book was released on 2021-06-02 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'An intriguing story of endurance and survival. A reminder of times, and the people who resisted them, that should never be forgotten.' – GILLIAN SLOVO In 1969, while a student at Wits University, John Schlapobersky was arrested for opposing apartheid. Thrown into a world that it is hard to believe ever existed, he was tortured, detained in solitary confinement and eventually deported. Half a century later, John sat down to write about what happened to him at 21. Calling on memory and two diaries he kept at the time – one written on toilet paper and the other in the Bible he was allowed – he describes being interrogated through sleep deprivation day and night and later writing secretly in solitary confinement. He remembers the singing of the condemned prisoners, and revisits the poetry, songs and texts that saw him through his ordeal. He reconstructs, in moving detail, the struggle for survival that finally transformed his life and supplements this with detailed research. He is now a leading psychotherapist and author and works closely with those who have similar histories. When They Came For Me is a vital historical document: a record of its time with lessons for ours.
Download or read book Constitutional Rights in Two Worlds written by Mark S. Kende and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-02 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the South African Constitutional Court to determine how it has functioned during the nation's transition.
Download or read book We the People written by Albie Sachs and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stirring collection of public talks and essays by an activist and former judge offers an intimate insider’s view of South Africa’s Constitution. This stirring collection of essays and talks by activist and former judge Albie Sachs is the culmination of more than 25 years of thought about constitution-making and non-racialism. Following the Constitutional Court's landmark Nkandla ruling in March 2016, it serves as a powerful reminder of the tenets of the Constitution, the rule of law and the continuous struggle to uphold democratic rights and freedoms. We, the People offers an intimate insider's view of South Africa's Constitution by a writer who has been deeply entrenched in its historical journey from the depths of apartheid right up to the politically contested present. As a second-year law student at the University of Cape Town, Sachs took part in the Defiance Campaign and went on to attend the Congress of the People in Kliptown, where the Freedom Charter was adopted in 1955. Three decades later, shortly after the bomb attack in Maputo that cost him his arm and the sight in one eye, he was called on by the Constitutional Committee of the African National Congress to co-draft (with Kader Asmal) the first outline of a Bill of Rights for a new democratic South Africa. In 1994, he was appointed by Nelson Mandela to the Constitutional Court, where he served as a judge until 2009. We, the People contains some of Sachs' most memorable public talks and writings, in which he takes us back to the broad-based popular foundations of the Constitution in the Freedom Charter. He picks up on Oliver Tambo's original vision of a non-racial future for South Africa, rather than one based on institutionalised power-sharing between the races. He explores the tension between perfectability and corruptibility, hope and mistrust, which lies at the centre of all constitutions. Sachs discusses the enforcement of social and economic rights, and contemplates the building of the Constitutional Court in the heart of the Old Fort Prison as a mechanism for reconciling the past and the future. Subjective experience and objective analysis interact powerfully in a personalised narrative that reasserts the value of constitutionality not just for South Africans, but for people striving to advance human dignity, equality and freedom across the world today.
Download or read book Dear Comrade President written by André Odendaal and published by Penguin Random House South Africa. This book was released on 2022-08-01 with total page 683 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his annual presidential address on 8 January 1986, ANC president Oliver Tambo called on South Africans to make apartheid ungovernable through armed action and militant struggle. But unknown to the world, on that very day, the quiet-spoken mathematics teacher and aspirant priest turned reluctant revolutionary had also set up a secret think tank in Lusaka, which he named the Constitution Committee, giving it an ‘ad hoc unique exercise’ that had ‘no precedent in the history of the movement’. Knowing that all wars end at a negotiating table, and judging the balance of forces to be moving in favour of the liberation movement, Tambo wanted the ANC to hold the initiative after the fall of apartheid. Assisted by Pallo Jordan, he instructed his new think tank to formulate the principles and draft the outlines of a constitution that could unite South Africa when the time came to talk in the fledgling days of freedom and democracy. The seven-member team, including Albie Sachs, Kader Asmal and Zola Skweyiya, started deliberating and reporting to Tambo. In correspondence, they typically addressed him as ‘Dear Comrade President’. Drawing on the personal archives of participants, Dear Comrade President explains how the purposeful first steps were taken in the making of South Africa’s Constitution. Why and how did this process happen? What were the first written words? When and where were they put on paper? By whom? What values did they espouse? And how did the committee’s work fit into the broader struggle? This book answers these questions in new, paradigm-shifting ways.
Download or read book Anglophone Jewish Literature written by Axel Stähler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-09-14 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: English has become the major language of contemporary Jewish literature. This book shows the transnational character of that literature and how traditional viewpoints need to be reassessed.
Download or read book Law Memory and the Legacy of Apartheid written by Wessel Le Roux and published by PULP. This book was released on 2007 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book In the Words of South African Struggle Heroes written by George Claassen and published by Penguin Random House South Africa. This book was released on 2012-09-27 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We have lost a lot of freedom in the past 30 years. But it's only when we don't stand up for it that we lose all.' Alan Paton, teacher, author and liberal politician, 1978. 'If it is for the truth that I must die, so let it be.' Joe Seremane, political prisoner, later Democratic Alliance chairperson. 'In Africa, things sometimes happen upside down. Such as the sun first had to set on the continent before it rose, and not the other way around.' Mathews Phosa, ANC exile, politician and Afrikaans poet.
Download or read book Dictionary of African Biography written by Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong and published by . This book was released on 2012-02-02 with total page 3382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Pharaohs to Fanon, Dictionary of African Biography provides a comprehensive overview of the lives of the men and women who shaped Africa's history. Unprecedented in scale, DAB covers the whole continent from Tunisia to South Africa, from Sierra Leone to Somalia. It also encompasses the full scope of history from Queen Hatsheput of Egypt (1490-1468 BC) and Hannibal, the military commander and strategist of Carthage (243-183 BC), to Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana (1909-1972), Miriam Makeba and Nelson Mandela of South Africa (1918 -).
Download or read book Against Normalization written by Anthony O'Brien and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2001-04-13 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVA literary study of South African cultural changes since the end of apartheid from 1980 to present./div
Download or read book Southern African Liberation Movements and the Global Cold War East written by Lena Dallywater and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-06-17 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the global context of the Cold War, the relationship between liberation movements and Eastern European states obviously changed and transformed. Similarly, forms of (material) aid and (ideological) encouragement underwent changes over time. The articles assembled in this volume argue that the traditional Cold War geography of bi-polar competition with the United States is not sufficient to fully grasp these transformations. The question of which side of the ideological divide was more successful (or lucky) in impacting actors and societies in the global south is still relevant, yet the Cold War perspective falls short in unfolding the complex geographies of connections and the multipolarity of actions and transactions that exists until today. Acknowledging the complexities of liberation movements in globalization processes, the papers thus argue that activities need to be understood in their local context, including personal agendas and internal conflicts, rather than relying primarily on the traditional frame of Cold War competition. They point to the agency of individual activists in both "Africa" and "Eastern Europe" and the lessons, practices and languages that were derived from their often contradictory encounters. In Southern African Liberation Movements, authors from South Africa, Portugal, Austria and Germany ask: What role did actors in both Southern Africa and Eastern Europe play? What can we learn by looking at biographies in a time of increasing racial and international conflict? And which "creative solutions" need to be found, to combine efforts of actors from various ideological camps? Building on archival sources from various regions in different languages, case studies presented in the edition try to encounter the lack of a coherent state of the art. They aim at combining the sometimes scarce sources with qualitative interviews to give answers to the many open questions regarding Southern African liberation movements and their connections to the "East".
Download or read book Scales of Memory written by Justin Collings and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-05 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the Second World War, constitutional justice has spread through much of the democratic world. Often it has followed in the wake of national calamity and historical evil - whether fascism or communism, colonialism or apartheid. Unsurprisingly, the memory of such evils plays a prominent role in constitutional adjudication. This book explores the relationship between constitutional interpretation and the memory of historical evil. Specifically, it examines how the constitutional courts of the United States, Germany, and South Africa have grappled, respectively, with the legacies of slavery, Nazism, and apartheid. Most courts invoke historical evil through either the parenthetical or the redemptive mode of constitutional memory. The parenthetical framework views the evil era as exceptional - a baleful aberration from an otherwise noble and worthy constitutional tradition. Parenthetical jurisprudence reaches beyond the evil era toward stable and enduring values. It sees the constitutional response to evil as restorative rather than revolutionary - a return to and reaffirmation of older traditions. The redemptive mode, by contrast, is more aggressive. Its aim is not to resume a venerable tradition but to reverse recent ills. Its animating spirit is not restoration, but antithesis. Its aim is not continuity with deeper pasts, but a redemptive future stemming from a stark, complete, and vivid rupture. This book demonstrates how, across the three jurisdictions, the parenthetical mode has often accompanied formalist and originalist approaches to constitutional interpretation, whereas the redemptive mode has accompanied realist and purposive approaches. It also shows how, within the three jurisdictions, the parenthetical mode of memory has consistently predominated in American constitutional jurisprudence; the redemptive mode in South African jurisprudence; and a hybrid, parenthetical-redemptive mode in German constitutional jurisprudence. The real-world consequences of these trends have been stark and dramatic. Memory matters, especially in constitutional interpretation.
Download or read book Democratising Development written by Peris Jones and published by Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. This book was released on 2005 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the prospects and means of achieving development through a democratic politics of socio-economic rights? Starting from the position that socio-economic rights are as legally and normatively valid as civil and political rights, this anthology explores the politics of acquiring and transforming socio-economic rights in South Africa. The post-apartheid South African experience shows that democracy is not a guarantee for elimination of poverty and inequality, but also that democratic institutions and politics may provide means for addressing past and present injustices. Thus it is argued that democratic politics of socio-economic rights democratises development while also developing democracy.
